These Animated Valve Shorts Will Open The Valve… To Your Emotions

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Valve is the video game developer behind games like Portal, Team Fortress, and Left 4 Dead. They really excel at making fun, humorous games, but the thing that always blows me away is their animated shorts. Their first series of films were hysterical introductions to the characters of Team Fortress 2.

The films really managed to give each class a distinct personality and fans had so much fun with the intros that Valve continued to make shorts featuring the characters that let you peek into their daily lives.

To create movies like these, Valve uses Source Filmmaker software, which, if you have Steam, you can use it for free. Source Filmmaker gives you a virtual movie set where you can use characters, sets, and items from games to direct your own videos. The Source Filmmaker community is pretty robust, so you can find custom content from a huge variety of games. This means that if you want to make a film featuring Piper from Fallout 4 gunning down Five Nights at Freddy’s‘ Springtrap, you can do so with gusto!

Plenty of people have made amazing shorts and Valve even has a competition called the Saxxy awards each year for fans to submit their works. Last year’s winner for the action category was called “Micro-Mann” and it looks as professionally animated as what you might watch before your favorite kids film (this one is not for kids though).

Some fans have been comparing the film to those of Pixar in an entirely positive way. What do you think? Has Valve infused their new video with some of Pixar’s magic? What would you like to see Valve film next? What sort of films do you want to create with Source Filmmaker? Let us know in the comments below!